Stonehenge and Salisbury

It sounds strange, but despite being from Wiltshire and having lived here most of my life, I've only actually been to Stonehenge once, when I was 9 or 10 years old. And the only reason I went that time was because my sister's French exchange was staying with us and really wanted to go! Actually, my family has always preferred to go to Avebury, as it's much nearer to where we live, it's free, and it's a lot less crowded.

However, my partner Claudio recently mentioned that he really wanted to go to Stonehenge - unlike Avebury, it is famous all over the world as one of the great historic landmarks of Europe. Moreover, we're going to be out of the country for most of December and plan to move away from Wiltshire in early 2025, so it made sense to go as soon as possible. The journey from our house is about 70 minutes, which may seem long by British standards, but is not long at all by Chilean standards, so Claudio was quite happy to drive down there!

The one big drawback of visiting Stonehenge is the cost; if you book online in advance, it costs a little over £25 per adult, and it's even more if you pay at the counter on the day. Very expensive, particularly in today's cost of living crisis! There is, however, the option of parking a little way out from the site and walking along a public footpath to a free viewpoint, which allows you to see the stones from one side only. We did consider this option, but eventually decided to cough up for the tickets, in order to see the stones from all angles and to visit the museum. We viewed the purchase of the tickets as a kind of bucket list experience, as we don't plan to go back for many years - probably not until we have kids who are old enough to find it interesting, which I certainly didn't when I went at the age of 9!

The drive down was actually quite interesting - we went through Avebury and then through some other pretty towns and villages like Devizes, with lots of traditional thatched cottages.

After arriving and having our tickets checked, we went to have a look at the recreation of houses from the prehistoric period that's located just outside the visitor centre entrance. There's even one that you can go inside!

And then we got on the shuttle bus over to the famous stone circle itself.

Weirdly, it was actually a lot bigger than I remember it being (usually I remember things from my childhood as being bigger than they really are), and while I remember only being able to see it from a distance, there's now actually one side of it that you can see fairly close up - though maybe that was always the case, and I just didn't remember it!

This time around, I also felt more of a sense of power and mystery coming from the stones; it's incredible to think that they were put there 5000 years ago, and that some of the stones came from as far away as Wales. It's a shame that we'll never get to see it as it was in its heyday when it was fully formed, but it still looks pretty good for its age!

Having now seen both Avebury and Stonehenge in recent years, I'd still choose Avebury for a day out, as it's a much more relaxing place (and it's free!), but the formation of Stonehenge is very special and unique and certainly worth seeing at least once in a lifetime.

Back at the visitor centre, we had a go at pulling an extremely heavy rock, before visiting the museum. Inside the museum, there's a big circular room made out of screens with images of Stonehenge as it was in the past, making you feel like you're inside the circle. That was pretty cool! It was also interesting to see a timeline showing how old Stonehenge is in comparison to other historic places we've visited or hope to visit in the future. 

We then headed south towards the city of Salisbury, stopping off at Old Sarum, which was once both an Iron Age hill fort and a Norman castle. I believe I'd seen it on TV once and been really impressed by it, which was why I wanted to go, but we quickly realised it's one of those places that looks much more impressive from a bird's eye view than it does on the ground.

Old Sarum is made up of two circular mounds - a smaller one on top of a bigger one - and while the bigger one is free to walk around (though there's a charge for parking), you have to pay £8 per person in order to walk around the smaller one, which has the remains of the Norman castle. Based on our view from the ticket office, there wasn't really that much to see there, and we'd already paid a lot for our Stonehenge tickets, so we decided to pass and just walk around the bigger mound. Our experience there was a little underwhelming, but I'd absolutely recommend looking up the bird's eye view images of the site.

Our final stop of the day was Salisbury itself, where our first port of call was the famous cathedral, known for having the tallest spire in England. It really was a majestic building to see and we're glad to have visited it, but unfortunately there's a charge of £12 to go inside (£10 if you book online in advance), and we couldn't really justify that after paying out so much for our Stonehenge tickets. You can walk around the cloisters for free though, which is a nice experience.

The rest of the city was also a picturesque place to walk around. It's very beautiful in a kind of Medieval English way, and made me think of York, as opposed to other beautiful cities near me like Bath, Cheltenham and Oxford, which have a more continental vibe.

All in all, it was a very fun day out, and felt like a real adventure, despite the fact we didn't leave our home county! Even though we're planning to move in 2025, it is nice to have places like these so close to our doorstep, and we're going to try to appreciate them as much as possible during the rest of the time that we'll be living in this part of the world.

Life, Travel and Blogging Update

Hi all!

This might be my last time writing on this blog for a while, so I just wanted to post a quick update about what's going on with me at the moment and my future plans for Charlotte's Travel Adventures.

Life in general

I would describe my life as having been in a somewhat transitional phase for the last year or so, but the good news is that things are finally moving in the right direction. After a lot of paperwork, money, stress and patience, Claudio's visa to live in the UK has finally been approved, and he's planning to come back next month! We did use legal assistance with our application, which helped a lot, but it was still a hugely challenging task, and we're so relieved it's finally done and our hard work has paid off.

Our next step, once he's here, is to look for our own place in the London area, but that may not happen as soon as we originally hoped. At the moment, my parents are both having some health issues, so I need to help out more in the house and possibly stay here a bit longer than planned. On top of that, the visa application and our upcoming wedding and honeymoon are all making a big dent in our finances, so it doesn't really make sense for us to move until Claudio has a job here and starts earning too.

Maybe it won't happen until 2025, but we're moving in the right direction now, and we're both really happy to be on the pathway to setting up a more permanent life together.

Our wedding!

Our wedding is coming up now in only a few months, which is hard to believe but very exciting! We can't wait to be properly married - though we're grateful that our civil union allowed us to get our visa to be able to live together, it's left us in the strange situation of kind of being "married" without actually being married. We always said that the civil union was basically just a legal process, and that our wedding and marriage would be the real event, but most people we know viewed the civil union as us getting married, and maybe that's meant there's been a bit less excitement among people we know surrounding our engagement and wedding than there would have been otherwise. (Of course, if governments didn't make it so difficult for couples from different countries to live together, we wouldn't have had to have a civil union in the first place!)

But I think that once the big day comes, it's going to feel very special for us, and hopefully for all our family and friends too. Our venue is exactly the kind of beach wedding setting I've dreamed of since childhood, and now the planning of the event is really coming together. We've got our date set, the photographer booked, my hair and makeup stylist booked, and I've bought my dress and had it altered. There are still more tasks to do, but we're feeling much more on top of things than we were, especially now that we don't have to think about the visa application anymore.

Another big task we've ticked off is booking our flights out to Chile and also reserving a gorgeous Airbnb in Santiago, where we'll stay in the days leading up to the wedding and for a couple of weeks afterwards, including over Christmas. I'm really looking forward to being back in one of my favourite cities and going back to something like the old lifestyle we had while we were in our little apartment in Ñuñoa, which I still miss. It's also going to be great to have a proper summer together, as Claudio went back to Chile on the 1st June and won't be back here again until late September, so he's basically missing the entire northern hemisphere summer. As for me, I haven't really done any fun summer activities since he left - I haven't had a holiday, set foot on a beach, or even been to a swimming pool. So our time in Chile is going to be a great opportunity to do all of those things we love, and I'm very excited about it!

Travel

Aside from visiting Westonbirt Arboretum in July, the only other day trip I've had in the last few months was when I went to London with my mum for a theatre day.

After a delicious lunch at Côte, we saw Frozen at Theatre Royal Drury Lane, which was fantastic. Although there were quite a lot of noisy kids in the audience, we really enjoyed the show (the quick change in Let It Go was a real highlight!) and the theatre was beautiful to look around.

Afterwards, we walked through Covent Garden, where there was an event going on with Nissan electric cars. One of the things I love about London is that there's always something happening!

Our day in London made me really excited to hopefully move there soon - it is one of my favourite cities in the world and both Claudio and I can imagine having a great life there.

Blogging

The final thing I want to write about today is this blog itself. 

I have a confession to make: I have lost a lot of motivation and interest in blogging and making travel content on social media recently. This loss of interest has been a gradual process that I've noticed particularly over the last 18 months or so, though I have had sporadic bursts of inspiration.

I fell in love with travel blogging during my Year Abroad, which led me to create Charlotte's Travel Adventures, a project that has been a huge passion of mine. During the pandemic years in particular, this blog was such an important outlet for me and I loved every minute working on it. Then life got more exciting and busier for me, and the blog took a bit of a back seat, but I always thought that the old passion would come back once life got quieter. However, since finishing the visa application, life has got quieter, and yet blogging kind of feels like work these days. I started writing a post last week that I thought would be really interesting to write, but the inspiration just didn't take me, and after having written just a couple of short paragraphs, I ended up deleting the draft - the first time I've ever done so. In addition, Google has been steadily de-indexing my posts and refusing to index any new ones since around September last year, which is quite demoralising.

My passion for travel is still as strong as ever, but while it used to go hand in hand with an equally strong passion for travel blogging, that's not really the case anymore. My other great passion in life, musical theatre, has come back into my life in a big way since January 2023, and maybe that's partly responsible for the lack of interest in blogging I'm now experiencing. Furthermore, after work and at the weekend, there are lots of other things I want to do more than I want to blog, such as watching musicals, movies, series and documentaries, reading books, singing, and working out. Stepping back from the blog will free up more time for me to do those things.

From now on, I won't be publishing anywhere near as many posts here as I do currently, and perhaps I might go months at a time without blogging. But there's no way I'll be closing this blog altogether - I absolutely want to post about our wedding and honeymoon and any other exciting trips we take in the future. And if inspiration takes me, perhaps I'll post about other travel-related topics occasionally. But I'll definitely be taking a break for the time being.

Thanks to everyone who's been reading here over the last several years. I hope to see you back here in the not too distant future! 😃

A Relaxing Weekend in Swansea

In order to make the most of Claudio's last full weekend here, we decided to take a little trip away. 

Initially, we'd been thinking of going up to Nottingham to see my old university, or possibly to Manchester, where neither of us have been before. But hotel and train prices are so steep at the moment, that it didn't seem worth it.

I then started looking at places a bit closer to home, like Bournemouth, where prices were better, but still not great considering a lot of hotels were badly reviewed. But looking at the different hotels, many of which had swimming pools, made us realise how much we wanted to go swimming! I hadn't been swimming since August last year, and Claudio hadn't been swimming for over a year, and we both were really missing it.

My dad suggested that we try Swansea - it's the city where my Nana was from, and we used to go on holiday there when I was little. So, I looked up Swansea on Hotels.com, and was very pleased to find a reasonably-priced hotel there - with a swimming pool!

The hotel we chose is part of a chain of hotels called Village Hotels. I'm not sure how long they've been running for, but I just started noticing them popping up on Hotels.com over the last few months. They all have a swimming pool and gym, but are quite reasonably priced (especially the one in Swansea, compared to those in England).

The Village Hotel Swansea is located in the docks of the city, which is quite a picturesque and modern area.

We were pleased to find that our room was very spacious and comfortable, and even had a bathtub.

After checking in, we went off to find some lunch at the India India all-you-can-eat buffet, which is about a 15 minute walk from the hotel. It had lots of different curries to try (including several veggie ones) and all of the delicious Indian side dishes you could wish for, as well as some tasty dessert options. We'd definitely go back!

We walked off our big lunch with a stroll along the beach and the marina. Even though the tide was out and the beach was a bit muddy, it was great to have some sea air.

Back by the docks, we had a look at the Norwegian Church, which is actually now a nursery. 

We then went back to the hotel to try the swimming pool!

In fact there was more than just a swimming pool to try out - there was also a sauna, a steam room, a jacuzzi within the pool itself (the same temperature as the pool water), and a hot tub outside of the pool (with hotter water). Although the steam room was a bit too hot for our liking, the other facilities were really nice to use, especially the hot tub.

The only downside was that the pool was open to members of the public as well as hotel guests, so it was busier than we would have liked. We went back again the following morning before breakfast, expecting it to be quieter, but it was actually even busier then.

But overall, it was really nice to swim again for the first time in ages, and to use spa facilities for the first time in years.

After our morning swim and breakfast at the hotel's Starbucks, it was time for us to see some castles!

We started off by walking into Swansea town centre to see the castle there. There's not so much left of it compared to other Welsh castles, but it's still quite dramatic to look at.

We then took the bus down to Mumbles to visit Oystermouth Castle. This is probably one of my favourite castles that I've visited in Wales! Not only is it a beautiful building, but it also has amazing views over the sea. 

You can pay to explore the entire castle, but we chose not too, as there's actually a lot you can look around for free. We spent quite a while there taking it all in.

Next, we went for a stroll along the seafront, picking up some delicious gelato at Verdi's along the way.

Past the pier, you can find Bracelet Bay beach, which is a really unspoilt beach with stunning views of the lighthouse.

We spent a really nice time there paddling in the sea and enjoying the views.

Overall, we had a great couple of days in Swansea, and felt like it was a nice contrast to previous trips we've taken. We realised that during a lot of our recent trips, we've walked for miles each day seeing different sights and often queuing at overcrowded attractions. While we love sightseeing, we definitely do not love crowds, and although we've still got a couple of very touristy places on our bucket list, we'd like to generally stick to more peaceful areas for our holidays in the future. We're not the sort of people to spend a whole week on a sunlounger without going anywhere, but we did appreciate the slower pace of this trip. We still walked lots on both days, but we didn't have to queue even once, and we felt quite restored after the trip, rather than exhausted!

Changing the subject to what's coming next on this blog, the truth is that I don't have any travels planned for the time being. We've got some BIG plans for December and January, but we want to save up a bit before then. Hopefully, once Claudio's got his visa, we'll do some little trips together, but for now, I'm going to focus on creating different kinds of posts rather than just write-ups of trips we've done. That's actually quite exciting, because I haven't really had the opportunity to try different things on this blog for a while, and I've got lots of ideas! My next post will be about a topic I find very interesting, and hopefully it'll be here on this blog in a week or two...